October surprise?

I think I know what the Republicans' October surprise is!

I've long kept an eye out for the GOP's "gotcha!" politics, and I know that no opposition candidate is completely safe from it. Good candidates have found their campaigns in tatters, and I've seriously considered whether parties should be able to run new candidates when their initial pick is unfairly weakened by smears.

Lately, everything the fuckheadosphere has trotted out against Obama has been a bust. Today, however, I think I've finally figured out what the GOP's October surprise is: manipulating gas prices and the stock market.

The oil industry (a major Republican cartel) manipulated prices in 2006 by gouging consumers with record-high gasoline costs and lowering the prices just before the election to make it look like things were going just swell (even though the prices remained much higher than they were before the gouging). It's clear they're pulling the exact same stunt now.

Just a few days ago, the drop in gas prices was reported to be one of the biggest drops ever (if not the biggest). The only fact that gets reported is the drop - not the fact that the prices were artificially high to begin with (and remain so).

Today - at least according to NBC - the stock market posted its biggest one-day gain in history. This after the economy spent years faltering. The media paid more attention to this one-day boost than in the overall state of the economy.

The market actually bears little resemblance to real economic conditions. When you hear about the crash of 1929, it's important to note than many Americans had already been living a Great Depression. The 1920s were like the 1990s and 2000s: Millions of Americans lived in poverty, but everyone turned a blind eye and pretended it wasn't going on. My grandparents were raised in the 1920s, and I remember them telling me that they didn't even have electric fans (although electric fans had been invented by then).

I think the market is being manipulated to create the illusion of prosperity. At minimum, the media is manipulating it to make everything appear rosy.

If you were watching TV earlier when they broke in with the stock reports (which they've been doing every weekday lately), all you heard was how the government needs to help banks more, and how the market's sudden upsurge was a response to new industry-friendly policies.

Who knows how long that'll last? The stock market is antithetical to the economic interests of most Americans, but the misconception that a prosperous market means a prosperous America is entrenched. If today's boost is part of a successful effort to manipulate the market for political gain, the market will probably sustain gains for the next 3 weeks, Americans will continue to bleed jobs and money, and the Republicans will deny there's anything wrong with the economy.

But I don't think people will fall for it.

If manipulating fuel prices and the stock market is the best October surprise the Right can come up with, they're toast.